Slow Light, Eager Vessel - Temple Contemporary, Philadelphia, PA
MFA Thesis Exhibition
01.08 - 02.02.23
Amira Pualwan is attuned to patterns and cycles, formations and architectures, reflections and refractions. She is also aware of breakdowns, interruptions, severances. This group of works is an investigation of the aesthetics of the cyclical under pressure. Pualwan’s inspiration is the
canicula: the yearly appearance of the dog constellation Sirius in the dawn skies of the Northern Hemisphere at the height of summer. Her chosen media -- printmaking, ceramics, and textile -- are each the result of applied pressure, whether from embossing, high temperature, or tension. The resulting compositions feature familiar images of blazing suns and rippling water, but also suggest their eventual disappearance, their infinite reflections that resist being contained.
Throughlines link and shape across time and geography, connecting ancient Greco-Roman bath infrastructure to the U.S. urban pool system -- both products of the channeling and diverting of water, especially in the summer. These spaces are sites of ritual: the long-awaited opening of the local pool every Memorial Day weekend, the application of olive oil (nowadays sunscreen) to the skin, the unrolling of towels, walking -- not running! -- along the water’s tiled edge, the plunge into refreshing waters. The repetitive, cyclical processes of Pualwan’s works are also forms of ritual that engage the senses, whether in the pieces’ physical creation or in the ways their installation envelopes the viewer. The liminal time of sunrise and sunset is translated into an ombré of color, into the warp and weft of a languidly hanging textile, into dual expressions of cyclical recurrences: orbit and weaving. Ceramic tiles are reprised in their role as ground, but their typical glassy and reflective surfaces are coated in matte inks of deep blue, suggesting the inky saturation that suffuses the sky at dusk or that is reflected in a pool’s watery sheen. In the gridded tile, woven textile, and color-blocked prints are throughlines across architecture and image. These infrastructures not only shape our experience and reaffirm cycles -- but also point outward, to weakening cycles, to once freak occurrences that are becoming common, to public pools that remain unfilled in the worsening summertime heat.
Words by Alexandra Schoolman, 2023